Ryuichi SAKAMOTO: from Bach to Rock to Pop
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Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Article ID 2284 | Dec 02, 2006 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Ryuichi SAKAMOTO: From Bach to Rock to Pop . and the Fate of the Corporate Earth David McNeill Ryuichi SAKAMOTO: From Bach to Rock to Pop . and the Fate of the Corporate Earth Interviewed by David McNeill Japan's expat rebel with many causes blends music and a wider world view Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks to David McNeill about music, the state of the planet -- and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City. What a long, strange journey it has been for Ryuichi Sakamoto. A revolutionary firebrand in the 1960s, he morphed into a '70s techno-pop pioneer with the seminal band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he co-founded with Hosono Haruomi and Takahashi Yukihiro. YMO became one of Japan's biggest-selling bands ever -- and even posted a late-'70s Top 20 hit in Britain with "Firecracker." The band was also a key influence on the techno and house movements that swept Western pop culture a decade later. Multi-talented Ryuichi Sakamoto pictured during his recent interview in Tokyo. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert Photo After a brief stint as a movie star in the early 1980s, including his role in Oshima Nagisa 's 1983 standout "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" -- for which he also wrote the soundtrack -- Sakamoto co-wrote (with Talking Heads' singer David Byrne and Cong Su) the 1987 Oscar-winning soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" -- still the best known of the many soundtracks he has written 1 4 | 12 | 0 APJ | JF -- of which 2002's "Femme Fatale" is among his latest. Film work, though, didn't derail Sakamoto from his music. Throughout, he has been collaborating with a wide range of creators, from rock's wild-man Iggy Pop to Brazilian pop muse Caetano Veloso. Along the way, Sakamoto has rubbed shoulders with many of the West's rock and cultural glitterati, including David Bowie, with whom he shared a famous onscreen kiss in "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" He has also been a soundtrack composer for directors Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone as well as Bertolucci. "The global view of cultures is part of my nature," says the former heart-throb. "I want to break down the walls between genres, categories or cultures.'' Sakamoto now lives with his teenage son in New York (he and Japanese musician Akiko Working a 20,000-plus crowd with Yano were divorced in 2002), and is primarily his samplers and synths on stage occupied as an avant-garde composer of at Rock in Japan Fes. 2005 in ambient music. At 54, Sakamoto is a long way Ibaraki Prefecture. David Hickey from his pop-idol prime, and has wandered far Photo from the mainstream spotlight. Currently, he is collaborating with cerebral German ambient "I'm always looking out for interesting people," musician Carsten Nicolai. On stage the two are says Sakamoto, whose previous long-term a study in contrasts: The classically trained musical foil was David Sylvian, formerly of pop Sakamoto sways and bows in concentration group Japan. "Somehow I see music as a over his acoustic piano, while Nicolai stands garden which has a lot of different styles: almost unmoving, like a member of fellow contemporary, classic, ethnic, Japanese, rock & German pioneering electronic group Kraftwerk, roll and so on. I can enjoy them all and there is coaxing blips and bleeps from his computers. space for them all. Their six-year collaboration has yielded three albums, including 2003's acclaimed "Vrioon.'' Oddly, despite his impressive musical resume, Sakamoto is probably better known among many in Japan today for his environmental and political work. A longtime activist who once hung out with the radical left, he is Greenpeace Japan's most famous supporter, a staunch antinuclear campaigner and one of the founders of Stop-Rokkasho.Org, a grass-roots project trying to close the controversial nuclear 2 4 | 12 | 0 APJ | JF reprocessing plant at Rokkasho in Aomori than that, though, we were really shocked that Prefecture. our friends in New York turned patriotic overnight. You know, they started putting out He has led several successful campaigns the flags and so on. So we were searching for a against the government, including a recent safer place, maybe Kenya or Brazil. (laughs) petition against a law that would have banned Japan is one of the United States' strongest the sale of electrical goods made before 2001. allies next to Britain and Italy, so Japan is Like many musicians, Sakamoto hated the law obviously not safe. The only reason why we're because he said it would have forced poor still staying in the U.S. is the school. Our son budding musicians to buy new instruments. goes to a Quaker school, very pacifist. He'll Unlike most, he fought it -- and won. graduate in three years, and we'll move somewhere safe. Japan is one of the options, After the United States and its allies invaded but only one. Iraq in 2003, he began what he calls a "chain- music project," enlisting more than 20 other So presumably you don't like a lot of what is artists to collaborate together to, as he puts it, going on in the world right now? "musically mark the passage of time that Iraq is in a state of war.'' Well, I'm very worried; politically and environmentally there are a lot of problems. He adds: "Even though the 100,000-plus Iraqi That's why I started the Rokkasho project with civilian and the 3,000-plus U.S. military lives a group of others. I'm very concerned about the lost to date can't be brought back, I want to danger of a nuclear leak and the proliferation keep this project alive and open -- until peace of plutonium, which terrorists could steal. comes to Iraq.'' Japan has 43 tons of plutonium now. That's 5,000 Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The plant will Few contemporary Japanese celebrities would produce another eight tons a year. What for?! stick their heads so visibly above the political Now we have North Korea's nuclear test, so the parapet, and Sakamoto claims his domestic taboo in Japan is going away and people are career has suffered. "Obviously, Japan has talking about (developing) nuclear weapons. some major corporations, and they are major clients of the mass media, so of course they The basic reason for this plant is the same as hate me. But I'm not worried because I know Japan's unnecessary dams. It is hugely what I have to do. I feel my responsibility to profitable for the general contractors. They speak out for my own children and future know nuclear power is unnecessary and generations." dangerous, and that it will be dangerous for hundreds of future generations because of the Sitting comfortably in a Tokyo hotel lounge of radioactive waste. It is just for money, and it is late, Sakamoto talked about all this and more -- absurd and stupid. I mean, we have to make beginning with where he now lives. money to live, I'm not against that, but why not choose something safer? You've lived in New York for many years. Have you ever thought about leaving? I don't hear anything explicitly political in your music. Do you prefer to keep the two separate? Obviously after 9/11, I and my partner talked about moving somewhere else. We were It's not my way to express my political opinions. worried about a second terrorist attack, I'm an instrumentalist. I'm also concerned perhaps a nuclear bomb in a briefcase. More about the way that music has been used, 3 4 | 12 | 0 APJ | JF especially by the Nazis. I was involved in Japan) is like a brother -- and like all brothers, political movements in the 1960s here. Not sometimes we are very close and sometimes with the Beiheiren (peaceful studentvery far apart. It depends on the time. David demonstrators against the Vietnam War), they Bowie, I like his stuff. My favorite Bowie period were softer than us. We were radicals. I used to is [1977's albums] "Low" and "Heroes." We think then a lot about propaganda and music. both live in the same city, but he is so But at the beginning of the 1970s, when the protected; he doesn't walk around the streets movements failed, I shut my mouth for 20 years so much! I see Yoko Ono sometimes; we because I was against using music forsometimes exchange aisatsu (greetings). propaganda. I didn't like the political folk singers of the time. Is that why you drifted into electronic music? No, I was playing the piano since I was 3 or 4 years old, so I missed my chance to buy my first guitar. (laughs) It is just the way things worked out. I eventually became really fed up with techno music [mimics the thump-thump sound of techno]. But within the techno movement, especially in Germany, there were some amazing talents, such as Oval [pioneering '90s experimental electronica outfit]. They were within the techno movement but they were very different, they were almost like a new pop version of Stockhausen. I was really surprised. Wow. Did they know where this music comes David Sylvian & from? Ryuichi Sakamoto, World Citizen You seem to shift easily from working with artists like Iggy Pop (who many people consider Do you worry about the state of things between the epitome of rock & roll) into avant-garde collaborations.